Новости за 08.06.2017

IF YOU had to pick someone to ruffle feathers, it would hardly be David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur for freedom of expression. A soft-spoken American law professor, Mr Kaye has prodded Japan to address concerns about the independence of its media. His report, which he presents to the UN’s Human Rights Council this month, triggered a peppery riposte from the hurriedly created Academics’ Alliance for Correcting Groundless Criticisms of Japan, a group of uptight university professors. Mr Kaye’s... Читать дальше...

ON THE ground floor of a primary school in Jaipur in the state of Rajasthan, five dozen pupils wait for the lunch break. The school has three teachers, but two of them are absent. One is “off sick” and the other, the head teacher, left at noon, explaining that she has “work to do”. No child is learning much. Thick poetry textbooks sit open before pupils who struggle to read simple sentences.

THE work was some of the trickiest Yu Zhijian and his friends had ever done. First they had to break each egg, 20 of them, neatly over a bowl. Then they had to fill each one with oil paint, dark blue, red or yellow, and glue it back together. Whose lousy scheme was this? he thought. Lousy except for the giant omelette, with spring onions, they were going to devour afterwards? Well, his. He had realised that eggs by themselves were too pale to leave much of a splash. So here he was sticky-fingered in Beijing... Читать дальше...

AFTER last weekend’s terrorist attack in London Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, declared that “enough is enough.” She was not suggesting that some reasonable amount of terrorism had now been exceeded; rather, that extremism had been too readily tolerated in the past. She specifically criticised the big internet firms. “We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed,” she said, adding that Britain and its allies needed to “regulate cyberspace to prevent terrorist and extremist planning”. Читать дальше...

HIS last Facebook post was perhaps the only clue of Raed Jaradat’s yearning for vengeance: it showed a Palestinian teenager lying dead with her headscarf soaked in blood and the message “Imagine if this were your sister.” Dania Irsheid, 17, had been shot by Israeli security forces in October 2015 at the entrance to the Ibrahimi mosque (Jews call it the Cave of the Patriarchs) in Hebron. Police said she had tried to stab Israelis; Palestinian witnesses say she was unarmed.

Print section Print Rubric:  Contaminated soil is the biggest neglected threat to public health in China Print Headline:  The bad earth Print Fly Title:  Pollution in China UK Only Article:  standard... Читать дальше...

Christopher Wray, next man up

THE hotly anticipated appearance before the Senate Intelligence committee of James Comey, whom Donald Trump fired as the FBI’s director last month, was scheduled to begin after The Economist went to press on June 8th. But his written statement, released the previous day, offered an explosive preview. In it Mr Comey related how, at a private dinner at the White House on January 27th, Mr Trump ominously advised him that many people wanted his job, explaining: “I need loyalty... Читать дальше...

JOSÉ ROMMEL UMANO, who is originally from the Philippines, moved to New York last autumn. He came on a family-reunification visa and joined his wife, who had been living in America for some time. This is a typical tale: America gives more weight to close family members when considering immigration applications than some other rich countries do. More surprising is that Mr Rommel Umano arrived with a master’s degree from the University of Tokyo and 20 years of experience as an architect in Japan. Читать дальше...

ALL serious governments think, hard, about unthinkable horrors. For America, China and other Asia-Pacific powers, few potential events are as grim to contemplate as a war involving North Korea, or that country’s violent collapse.

THE work was some of the trickiest Yu Zhijian and his friends had ever done. First they had to break each egg, 20 of them, neatly over a bowl. Then they had to fill each one with oil paint, dark blue, red or yellow, and glue it back together. Whose lousy scheme was this? he thought. Lousy except for the giant omelette, with spring onions, they were going to devour afterwards? Well, his. He had realised that eggs by themselves were too pale to leave much of a splash. So here he was sticky-fingered in Beijing... Читать дальше...

Belted up

FOR centuries, canes have served blind and partially sighted people well by giving them a means to negotiate the world around them. The only serious upgrade they have undergone dates back to 1921, when a Briton called James Biggs, who had recently lost his sight, painted his own cane white in order to make it easily visible and to alert others to the presence of someone unable to see nearby obstacles. In the opinion of Daniela Rus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)... Читать дальше...

THE thing about Gedankenexperimente—or thought experiments, for those who find Albert Einstein’s native tongue too twisting—is that you never know where they might lead. For Einstein, they led to the theory of relativity. For James Clerk Maxwell, they conjured an imaginary demon who could violate the second law of thermodynamics. For Erwin Schrödinger, they created an existentially confused cat that was simultaneously dead and alive.

ALL good things come to an end. Moore’s law—the observation that the number of transistors that can be crammed onto a chip of a given size doubles every two years—has built the modern, computerised world. But as transistors get smaller, making them smaller still gets harder. In recent years Moore’s law has begun to slow.

IN SEPTEMBER 1961 a small hurricane called Esther swirled into being above the warm waters of the mid-Atlantic. It bore down on America’s east coast, executed a graceful clockwise loop-the-loop off the shores of New York, then gusted up through Maine and into Quebec as little more than a squall.

WHEN Donald Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement on June 1st, he spelled out that it would no longer contribute to the Green Climate Fund. This is a UN initiative to use rich countries’ money to bring climate finance to developing ones. But even if the fund were going swimmingly, public-sector finance would only be able to provide a small part of the cash needed by poor countries, and indeed the world.

EMERGING markets have been through a lot over the past four years. The “taper tantrum” in 2013 (prompted by fears of a change in American monetary policy); the oil-price drop in 2014; China’s botched devaluation of its currency in 2015; and India’s botched “demonetisation” of much of its own currency in late 2016 (removing high-value banknotes from circulation). But 2017 has started more brightly. Indeed, for the first time in two and a half years, the world’s four biggest emerging economies (Brazil... Читать дальше...

Not in the rule book

FEW cheer the rising levels of America’s household debt, which reached a record $12.7trn at the end of the first quarter. Nearly 5% of the total, or $615bn, was in some stage of delinquency. One group, however, can barely hide its glee: third-party debt-collection firms, which try to recover mostly consumer loans on behalf of creditors without the resources to chase down bad borrowers themselves.

Business is expanding “at a robust rate”, says Keith Kettelkamp... Читать дальше...

A NEWSPAPER cannot publish for 174 years without some mistakes. This one has made its share. We thought Britain was safe in the European exchange-rate mechanism just weeks before it crashed out; we opined, in 1997, that Indonesia was well placed to avoid financial crisis; we noted in 1999 that oil, at $10 per barrel, might well reach $5, almost perfectly timing the bottom of the market; and in 2003 we supported the invasion of Iraq. For individuals, like publications, errors are painful—particularly now... Читать дальше...

EVERY year it seems that analysts and investors play a ritual game. They begin by asserting that government bonds are terrible value and that, accordingly, this must be the year when yields will rise (and prices fall). And then they get mugged by reality.

HIS last Facebook post was perhaps the only clue of Raed Jaradat’s yearning for vengeance: it showed a Palestinian teenager lying dead with her headscarf soaked in blood and the message “Imagine if this were your sister.” Dania Irsheid, 17, had been shot by Israeli security forces in October 2015 at the entrance to the Ibrahimi mosque (Jews call it the Cave of the Patriarchs) in Hebron. Police said she had tried to stab Israelis; Palestinian witnesses say she was unarmed.

AFTER last weekend’s terrorist attack in London Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, declared that “enough is enough.” She was not suggesting that some reasonable amount of terrorism had now been exceeded; rather, that extremism had been too readily tolerated in the past. She specifically criticised the big internet firms. “We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed,” she said, adding that Britain and its allies needed to “regulate cyberspace to prevent terrorist and extremist planning”. Читать дальше...

ON THE ground floor of a primary school in Jaipur in the state of Rajasthan, five dozen pupils wait for the lunch break. The school has three teachers, but two of them are absent. One is “off sick” and the other, the head teacher, left at noon, explaining that she has “work to do”. No child is learning much. Thick poetry textbooks sit open before pupils who struggle to read simple sentences.

IF YOU had to pick someone to ruffle feathers, it would hardly be David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur for freedom of expression. A soft-spoken American law professor, Mr Kaye has prodded Japan to address concerns about the independence of its media. His report, which he presents to the UN’s Human Rights Council this month, triggered a peppery riposte from the hurriedly created Academics’ Alliance for Correcting Groundless Criticisms of Japan, a group of uptight university professors. Mr Kaye’s... Читать дальше...

THE day after Cambodia held its five-yearly local elections, both sides could claim some kind of victory. The ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) celebrated because, according to preliminary results—which both sides appear to accept—it won 1,162 of the country’s 1,646 communes. But the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) did remarkably well, increasing the communes it will now control more than tenfold, from 40 to 471. Unofficial totals suggest that it won 46% of the popular vote, up from the 30% the opposition won in 2012. Читать дальше...

ALL serious governments think, hard, about unthinkable horrors. For America, China and other Asia-Pacific powers, few potential events are as grim to contemplate as a war involving North Korea, or that country’s violent collapse.